Teaching Privacy

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The Teaching Privacy Team, a cross-disciplinary research group composed of computer scientists, educators, and social scientists at ICSI and UC Berkeley, works to educate the public about the privacy implications of the information shared publicly on the Internet. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation through the Geo-Tube project. The project seeks to help users, particularly younger ones, understand the ways in which it is possible to aggregate public and seemingly innocuous information from different media and Web sites to attack the privacy of users.

According to the Teaching Privacy team:

The growing use of social-networking sites like Facebook and YouTube, along with technical advances in data-retrieval techniques, are providing new opportunities to make use of people's personal information--and those opportunities are equally available for both ethical and unethical uses. Current computer science curricula at high schools and colleges usually include an abundance of material on data-retrieval methods and how to improve them, but rarely make room for discussion of the potential negative impact of these technologies.

This slide explains some of the more important considerations:

There is also a .pdf available with more detailed information about online privacy and the Teaching Privacy project.